Ben Rhodes

Yeah, I there if people are watching this and thinking like, well, you know, what's the big deal?

Why can't the United States, you know, there are only 30 or 50,000 people there or even Maduro like we did this.

What's the big deal?

There's two problems, meta problems.

Right.

One is that the Trump administration just doesn't give a shit about people.

So if the people getting blown up in the boats are fishermen, they don't care.

If Venezuela descends into violent chaos, they don't care.

Like they don't, there's a valueless, if you're not an American and probably specifically a white American, they don't give a shit about you.

And that's an alarming worldview.

And that tends to lead to bad things that happen where we break countries and they're a mess for years.

The second piece is one you just said, though, like we we are breaking every single rule that has held the world together since World War Two.

People got together after World War Two because they had seen where autocrats, nationalism and military aggression led.

It led to two world wars.

Those two world wars were so devastating that everybody got together and were like, we need laws of war to govern how and when countries can go to war.

We need laws to make sure that sovereignty is an inviolable principle so big countries just don't invade small ones.

Because they didn't want not just another world war, they didn't want a nuclear world war.

They didn't want World War III, right?

That's why you get a whole UN system, all these things.

And Trump is tearing at all of that with this.